The 2s/30s spread — 30Y yield minus 2Y yield — is the width of the yield curve at its extremes (positive = normal, negative = inverted: see Yield curve spread (the basics) for the basics). Steepening has two very different flavors: a bull steepener (front end rallies because cuts get priced; usually benign or recessionary-easing) and a bear steepener (long end sells off because holders demand more term premium; the market charging the sovereign for inflation and fiscal risk). Same chart, opposite messages — the spread alone doesn’t tell you which leg moved, so always ask before interpreting.
Specimen, 07/2026 (Zschäpitz/Bloomberg): 2s/30s jumped +16bp in a day to ~96bp, blamed on Fed Chair Warsh’s “all talk, no walk” — hawkish rhetoric without action. With the 30Y at multi-decade highs the same week (see Bond vigilantes), this reads as a bear steepener: the long end repricing on its own, which is the vigilante mechanism and the setup Fiscal dominance predicts ends in intervention. Context the day-move framing omits: at ~96bp the curve was still flatter than its 2025 peak (~150bp) — the jump is a sharp reversal within a 2026 flattening trend, not a new extreme. The curve was deeply inverted (below −100bp) in 2023 and has been re-steepening since 2024.